Joanna Latimer
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 196372 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Joanna Latimer |
| PRENOMES | Joanna |
| SOBRENOME | Latimer |
| ASSINATURA | LATIMER J |
| AFILIAÇÕES | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-7418-7515 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 36 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 639 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 36 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 1997 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2025 |
| ÍNDICE H | 15 |
Kinship Health Relationships
Through an innovative interspecies analysis, this article explores narratives surrounding the medical treatment of humans and pet animals at the end of life among U.K. veterinary surgeons, medical practitioners, and members of the public. Contrasting the care options open to pet owners with those available to human patients, and through a thematic focus on treatments and medicines, euthanasia, and palliation, this article pays close attention to …
Testing Times
Non-invasive prenatal testing (NIPT) is a genomic technology used to predict the chance of a foetus having a genetic condition. Despite the immediacy of this technology’s integration into clinical practice, there is a dearth of evidence outlining how both patients and professionals experience NIPT on the ground. In this article, we draw upon our collective empirical research—specifically on earlier screening technologies (BKR), Down syndrome scre…
Biomarkers and brains
This paper provides a comparison of how genetic biomarkers are used (or not) in three contexts: clinic-based diagnostic work with people; lab-based research on mice and their marbles; and lab-based research on thrashing nematodes. For all the worldwide drive to find biomarkers that can be used in the detection of early, presymptomatic dementia, there is little research on how or when the association between biomarkers and a definitive disease are…
Alzheimer’s disease and the development of a post-genomic science
Alzheimer’s disease has been a reference point for the promise and potential of genetic and genomic science from 1980s molecular biology through the sequencing of the human genome to ongoing effort
Somaticization, the making and unmaking of minded persons and the fabrication of dementia
This article examines the strategies by which the different and variable signs of failing mental powers become known sufficiently for ‘dementia’ to be made into a stable bio-clinical entity, that can be tested, diagnosed and perhaps one day even treated. Drawing on data from ethnographic observations in memory clinics, together with interviews with associated scientists and clinicians, we document the challenges that clinicians face across the cl…
Science under siege? Being alongside the life sciences, giving science life
The aim in this article is to explore conditions of possibility for giving life to science in the context of science being under siege from the twin agendas of industrialization and managerialization. The focus of this exploration is my experiencing a shift from being brought in as an ally in the strategic conduct of others to then becoming engaged in the life sciences of ageing. In nuancing these different ways of 'being alongside', I show how s…
A conversation
Intimate Entanglements
This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shif…
Entanglements in Health and Well-being
Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how human health becomes entangled with that of model organisms in day-to-day biomedical science. Social science scholarship on modeling has exploredeitherhow specific models impact and shape our knowledge of human diseaseorhow animal technicians and scientists affect laboratory animals. This article extends this relational approach by asking how embodied and institutional car…
Repelling neoliberal world-making? How the ageing-dementia relation is reassembling the social
Growing old 'badly' is stigmatizing, a truism that is enrolled into contemporary agendas for the biomedicalization of ageing. Among the many discourses that emphasize ageing as the root cause of later life illnesses, dementia is currently promoted as an epidemic and such hyperbole serves to legitimate its increasing biomedicalization. The new stigma however is no longer contained to simply having dementia, it is failing to prevent it. Anti-ageing…
Afterword
In this paper I explore how the papers in this volume offer ways of thinking about materialities of care in terms of political ecologies, including hierarchies of value as well as assemblages, in which strategic agendas are made present in everyday practices, with profound and ordinary affects, as well as effects. I show how power can work through the association of multiple and heterogeneous materials and social processes to create 'thresholds',…
Uprooting Class? Culture, World-Making and Reform
The paper opens up the issue of how to relate culture to class in the UK. First, problematizing the conflation of class with status - inherent to stratification models like the GBCS - we theorize culture as 'world-making' rather than limit culture to artistic or individual possession. Second, exploring culture in the wake of reforms aimed at local and institutional 'cultures' that are said to hold back economic growth, we examine power relations …
In/Exclusion in the Clinic
In this article, we draw on two clinical ethnographies to explore how mundane social practices, affective processes and cultural materials (re)produce divisions and forms of in/exclusion. By treating everyday life and routines as serious categories of analysis, we identify how power relations are accomplished and how persons/future persons - namely the 'dysmorphic' child or the foetus who has or may have Down's syndrome - are constituted as un/va…
Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Non-human
Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned …
Rewriting Bodies, Portraiting Persons? The New Genetics, the Clinic and the Figure of the Human
Contemporary debate suggests that the new genetics may be changing ideas about the body and what it is to be human. Specifically, there are notions that the new genetics seems to erode the ideas that underpin modernity, such as the figure of the integrated, discrete, conscious individual body-self. Holding these ideas against the practices of genetic medicine, however, this article suggests a quite different picture; one that does not erase, but …
Being Alongside
This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social …
Ordering, Enrolling, and Dismissing
Drawing on ethnographies of three areas of hospital life in the United Kingdom, this article explores the different logics played out through moments of access to hospital services. The authors make explicit the character of the hospital as heterotopia where different social actors are required to “fit” in with the organizational requirements of the hospital. What becomes clear is how the hospital as institution can accommodate particular logics …
Meadowarts’ House of Beasts

The Politics of Imagination
A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may happen. The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, …
Keeping & Dwelling
This article explores the topic of home in terms of the art of dwelling. We set out to show that what people “keep” affects their experience of dwelling. Keeping, in this analysis, grants relational extension (Latimer 2009a, 2009b; Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991; Latimer and Munro 2006), creating and reproducing worlds that bind. As we illustrate, the meaning of home for Euro-Americans can be understood as gravitating from feelings of belonging bei…
Natural Relations
Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non-human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro-American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what …
Accounting for Ethos or Programmes for Conduct? The Brave New World of Research Ethics Committees
This paper examines the operation of power and its consequences arising from the growth of new ethical bureaucracies in universities. We use the UK as a case study to illustrate more general points about the globalised nature and impact of such bureaucratisation. Our focus is on the social sciences as this is where, we argue, the impact is likely to be most marked. The paper is organised in five sections. The first introduces our concerns. Sectio…
Introduction
Unsettling Bodies
Diagnosis, Dysmorphology, and the Family
This article examines the specific ways in which the gene, the clinic, and the family interact in clinical consultations over children with suspected congenital problems. It draws upon an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialty in genetic medicine that involves the study of abnormal human forms and the description of complex syndromes. Dysmorphologists describe what they do as "genetic counselling," a twin process of differential diagnosis and …
Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Non-human
Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned …
Being Alongside
This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social …
Intimate Entanglements
This article introduces Intimate Entanglements by proposing three interrelated shifts that result from juxtaposing experiences with different world-making practices at the intersection of care, technoscience and theoretical engagements with affect theory and Science and Technology Studies (STS). The first shift positions intimacy as not only relevant in STS but also as a more general epistemic concern of social scientific enquiry. The second shif…
Giving Patients a Future
Drawing on an ethnography of conduct within an acute medical unit, the paper explores how nurses and doctors constitute classes of patient to help accomplish their ordering work. For example, patients such as older people and those who are chronically sick are figured as having only limited medical futures. The current analysis suggests that staff deploy patients’ (perceived) social identities to help (re)figure them in particular ways to organis…
Transforming general practice
The paper focuses on the redistribution of medical work within primary health care teams. It reports the results of the analysis of interviews with general practitioners, practice nurses and managers, undertaken as part of an ethnographic study of primary care organisation and practice during a period of rapid organisational change. By examining the ways in which the respondents account for how work is being redefined and redistributed, we explor…
Afterword
In this paper I explore how the papers in this volume offer ways of thinking about materialities of care in terms of political ecologies, including hierarchies of value as well as assemblages, in which strategic agendas are made present in everyday practices, with profound and ordinary affects, as well as effects. I show how power can work through the association of multiple and heterogeneous materials and social processes to create 'thresholds',…
Natural Relations
Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non-human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro-American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what …
Rebirthing the Clinic
The article reconsiders the nature and location of science in the development of genetic classification. Drawing on field studies of medical genetics, we explore how patient categorization is accomplished in between the clinic and laboratory. We focus on dysmorphology, a specialism concerned with complex syndromes that impair physical development. We show that dys-morphology is about more than fitting patients into prefixed diagnostic categories …
Dysmorphology and the spectacle of the clinic
Dysmorphology is the medical study of abnormal forms in the human and is concerned with the identification and classification of a variety of congenital malformations. Such diagnostic work rests on the inspection of images of affected individuals. Based on physical appearance individuals are classified in terms of a wide range of conditions, often with 'exotic' nomenclatures. This paper will describe the features of clinical dysmorphology and the…
Keeping & Dwelling
This article explores the topic of home in terms of the art of dwelling. We set out to show that what people “keep” affects their experience of dwelling. Keeping, in this analysis, grants relational extension (Latimer 2009a, 2009b; Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991; Latimer and Munro 2006), creating and reproducing worlds that bind. As we illustrate, the meaning of home for Euro-Americans can be understood as gravitating from feelings of belonging bei…
Driving the Social
In this article, the authors discuss ways in which the experience of automobile driving comes to 'inhabit' other forms of relationships, including thought and conversation. The authors first argue for an approach to the automobile that uses a way of understanding the car as a cultural system of enhancement, rather than just accept in total Urry's 'conquering hybrid of automobility.' They draw attention to the car as system, thus opposing referenc…
The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs
Like all social actors, older people draw on cultural meanings to perform identity. However, when advanced aging brings loss of status as full persons, particularly when it is associated with sickness and dependency, older people can be deemed unsuitable for active medical treatment and care. In addition, loss of status may make it difficult for older people to influence how they and their needs and wants are identified, and how their future life…
Repelling neoliberal world-making? How the ageing-dementia relation is reassembling the social
Growing old 'badly' is stigmatizing, a truism that is enrolled into contemporary agendas for the biomedicalization of ageing. Among the many discourses that emphasize ageing as the root cause of later life illnesses, dementia is currently promoted as an epidemic and such hyperbole serves to legitimate its increasing biomedicalization. The new stigma however is no longer contained to simply having dementia, it is failing to prevent it. Anti-ageing…
Diagnosis, Dysmorphology, and the Family
This article examines the specific ways in which the gene, the clinic, and the family interact in clinical consultations over children with suspected congenital problems. It draws upon an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialty in genetic medicine that involves the study of abnormal human forms and the description of complex syndromes. Dysmorphologists describe what they do as "genetic counselling," a twin process of differential diagnosis and …
Commanding Materials
The article explores some specific consequences of a 'crisis of legitimation' for relations of power. Drawing together sociological concerns over power/knowledge with anthropological understandings about the place of materials in the ordering of relations, the article analyses how authority is legitimated in the context of multiple possibilities for interpretation and conduct. The site of exploration is an ethnography of multi-disciplinary work i…
The Politics of Imagination
A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may happen. The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, …
Accounting for Ethos or Programmes for Conduct? The Brave New World of Research Ethics Committees
This paper examines the operation of power and its consequences arising from the growth of new ethical bureaucracies in universities. We use the UK as a case study to illustrate more general points about the globalised nature and impact of such bureaucratisation. Our focus is on the social sciences as this is where, we argue, the impact is likely to be most marked. The paper is organised in five sections. The first introduces our concerns. Sectio…
Entanglements in Health and Well-being
Drawing on collaborative ethnographic fieldwork, this article explores how human health becomes entangled with that of model organisms in day-to-day biomedical science. Social science scholarship on modeling has exploredeitherhow specific models impact and shape our knowledge of human diseaseorhow animal technicians and scientists affect laboratory animals. This article extends this relational approach by asking how embodied and institutional car…
All-Consuming Passions
Ordering, Enrolling, and Dismissing
Drawing on ethnographies of three areas of hospital life in the United Kingdom, this article explores the different logics played out through moments of access to hospital services. The authors make explicit the character of the hospital as heterotopia where different social actors are required to “fit” in with the organizational requirements of the hospital. What becomes clear is how the hospital as institution can accommodate particular logics …
Uprooting Class? Culture, World-Making and Reform
The paper opens up the issue of how to relate culture to class in the UK. First, problematizing the conflation of class with status - inherent to stratification models like the GBCS - we theorize culture as 'world-making' rather than limit culture to artistic or individual possession. Second, exploring culture in the wake of reforms aimed at local and institutional 'cultures' that are said to hold back economic growth, we examine power relations …
Socialising Disease
When older peoples' troubles are categorised as social rather than medical, hospital care can be denied them. Drawing on an ethnography of older people admitted as emergencies to an acute medical unit, the article demonstrates how medical categories can provide shelter for older people. By holding their clinical identity on medical rather than social grounds, physicians who specialise in gerontology in the acute medical domain can help prevent th…
Rewriting Bodies, Portraiting Persons? The New Genetics, the Clinic and the Figure of the Human
Contemporary debate suggests that the new genetics may be changing ideas about the body and what it is to be human. Specifically, there are notions that the new genetics seems to erode the ideas that underpin modernity, such as the figure of the integrated, discrete, conscious individual body-self. Holding these ideas against the practices of genetic medicine, however, this article suggests a quite different picture; one that does not erase, but …
In/Exclusion in the Clinic
In this article, we draw on two clinical ethnographies to explore how mundane social practices, affective processes and cultural materials (re)produce divisions and forms of in/exclusion. By treating everyday life and routines as serious categories of analysis, we identify how power relations are accomplished and how persons/future persons - namely the 'dysmorphic' child or the foetus who has or may have Down's syndrome - are constituted as un/va…
Introduction
Giving Patients a Future
Drawing on an ethnography of conduct within an acute medical unit, the paper explores how nurses and doctors constitute classes of patient to help accomplish their ordering work. For example, patients such as older people and those who are chronically sick are figured as having only limited medical futures. The current analysis suggests that staff deploy patients’ (perceived) social identities to help (re)figure them in particular ways to organis…
Older People in Hospital
L'A. examine les phenomenes de division entre les membres du personnel hospitalier. Il presente un certain nombre de donnees collectees en Grande-Bretagne aupres de professions medicales chargees du soin de personnes âgees. Il montre en quoi la redistribution du travail contribue a affirmer la position sociale de certaines categories de personnel medical. Il etudie les notions de placement et de deplacement. Il envisage les relations de pouvoir e…
The Dark at the Bottom of the Stairs
Like all social actors, older people draw on cultural meanings to perform identity. However, when advanced aging brings loss of status as full persons, particularly when it is associated with sickness and dependency, older people can be deemed unsuitable for active medical treatment and care. In addition, loss of status may make it difficult for older people to influence how they and their needs and wants are identified, and how their future life…
Socialising Disease
When older peoples' troubles are categorised as social rather than medical, hospital care can be denied them. Drawing on an ethnography of older people admitted as emergencies to an acute medical unit, the article demonstrates how medical categories can provide shelter for older people. By holding their clinical identity on medical rather than social grounds, physicians who specialise in gerontology in the acute medical domain can help prevent th…
All-Consuming Passions
Surveying 'slides'
The work of clinical geneticists includes the inspection of visible abnormalities and their allocation to clinical categories. Drawing on observations of departmental clinical meetings in a medical genetics service, we describe how diagnostic work is accomplished through the practical observation and reasoning of clinical professionals. We suggest that, while the use of molecular tests is increasing the diagnostic repertoire in various ways, clin…
Transforming general practice
The paper focuses on the redistribution of medical work within primary health care teams. It reports the results of the analysis of interviews with general practitioners, practice nurses and managers, undertaken as part of an ethnographic study of primary care organisation and practice during a period of rapid organisational change. By examining the ways in which the respondents account for how work is being redefined and redistributed, we explor…
Commanding Materials
The article explores some specific consequences of a 'crisis of legitimation' for relations of power. Drawing together sociological concerns over power/knowledge with anthropological understandings about the place of materials in the ordering of relations, the article analyses how authority is legitimated in the context of multiple possibilities for interpretation and conduct. The site of exploration is an ethnography of multi-disciplinary work i…
Dysmorphology and the spectacle of the clinic
Dysmorphology is the medical study of abnormal forms in the human and is concerned with the identification and classification of a variety of congenital malformations. Such diagnostic work rests on the inspection of images of affected individuals. Based on physical appearance individuals are classified in terms of a wide range of conditions, often with 'exotic' nomenclatures. This paper will describe the features of clinical dysmorphology and the…
Rebirthing the Clinic
The article reconsiders the nature and location of science in the development of genetic classification. Drawing on field studies of medical genetics, we explore how patient categorization is accomplished in between the clinic and laboratory. We focus on dysmorphology, a specialism concerned with complex syndromes that impair physical development. We show that dys-morphology is about more than fitting patients into prefixed diagnostic categories …
Driving the Social
In this article, the authors discuss ways in which the experience of automobile driving comes to 'inhabit' other forms of relationships, including thought and conversation. The authors first argue for an approach to the automobile that uses a way of understanding the car as a cultural system of enhancement, rather than just accept in total Urry's 'conquering hybrid of automobility.' They draw attention to the car as system, thus opposing referenc…
Diagnosis, Dysmorphology, and the Family
This article examines the specific ways in which the gene, the clinic, and the family interact in clinical consultations over children with suspected congenital problems. It draws upon an ethnography of dysmorphology, a specialty in genetic medicine that involves the study of abnormal human forms and the description of complex syndromes. Dysmorphologists describe what they do as "genetic counselling," a twin process of differential diagnosis and …
Introduction
Unsettling Bodies
Keeping & Dwelling
This article explores the topic of home in terms of the art of dwelling. We set out to show that what people “keep” affects their experience of dwelling. Keeping, in this analysis, grants relational extension (Latimer 2009a, 2009b; Munro, 1996; Strathern, 1991; Latimer and Munro 2006), creating and reproducing worlds that bind. As we illustrate, the meaning of home for Euro-Americans can be understood as gravitating from feelings of belonging bei…
Natural Relations
Maintaining the tensions and divisions between the human and non-human, nature and culture has been a mainstay of Euro-American thought. Drawing upon two studies of people's associations with horses, we examine how these divisions are being reworked in the social sciences as well in everyday life. We focus on how different ideas about ‘horses’, ‘horsemanship’ and how knowledge is acquired, accomplishes different social worlds. Specifically, what …
Accounting for Ethos or Programmes for Conduct? The Brave New World of Research Ethics Committees
This paper examines the operation of power and its consequences arising from the growth of new ethical bureaucracies in universities. We use the UK as a case study to illustrate more general points about the globalised nature and impact of such bureaucratisation. Our focus is on the social sciences as this is where, we argue, the impact is likely to be most marked. The paper is organised in five sections. The first introduces our concerns. Sectio…
The Politics of Imagination
A simple phrase takes its meaning from a given context, and already makes its appeal to another one in which it will be understood; but, of course, to be understood it has to transform the context in which it is inscribed. As a result, this appeal, this promise of the future, will necessarily open up the production of a new context, wherever it may happen. The future is not present, but there is an opening onto it; and because there is a future, …
Ordering, Enrolling, and Dismissing
Drawing on ethnographies of three areas of hospital life in the United Kingdom, this article explores the different logics played out through moments of access to hospital services. The authors make explicit the character of the hospital as heterotopia where different social actors are required to “fit” in with the organizational requirements of the hospital. What becomes clear is how the hospital as institution can accommodate particular logics …
Meadowarts’ House of Beasts

Naturecultures? Science, Affect and the Non-human
Rather than focus on effects, the isolatable and measureable outcomes of events and interventions, the papers assembled here offer different perspectives on the affective dimension of the meaning and politics of human/non-human relations. The authors begin by drawing attention to the constructed discontinuity between humans and non-humans, and to the kinds of knowledge and socialities that this discontinuity sustains, including those underpinned …
Rewriting Bodies, Portraiting Persons? The New Genetics, the Clinic and the Figure of the Human
Contemporary debate suggests that the new genetics may be changing ideas about the body and what it is to be human. Specifically, there are notions that the new genetics seems to erode the ideas that underpin modernity, such as the figure of the integrated, discrete, conscious individual body-self. Holding these ideas against the practices of genetic medicine, however, this article suggests a quite different picture; one that does not erase, but …
Being Alongside
This paper broadens out existing challenges to the divisions between the human and the animal that keep humans distinct, and apart, from other animals. Much attention to date has focused on how the Euro-American individuation of the human subject intensifies the asymmetries inculcated by these divisions. This paper rehearses some of this literature but goes on to attend to how these divisions undercut understandings of sociality and limit social …
Uprooting Class? Culture, World-Making and Reform
The paper opens up the issue of how to relate culture to class in the UK. First, problematizing the conflation of class with status - inherent to stratification models like the GBCS - we theorize culture as 'world-making' rather than limit culture to artistic or individual possession. Second, exploring culture in the wake of reforms aimed at local and institutional 'cultures' that are said to hold back economic growth, we examine power relations …
In/Exclusion in the Clinic
In this article, we draw on two clinical ethnographies to explore how mundane social practices, affective processes and cultural materials (re)produce divisions and forms of in/exclusion. By treating everyday life and routines as serious categories of analysis, we identify how power relations are accomplished and how persons/future persons - namely the 'dysmorphic' child or the foetus who has or may have Down's syndrome - are constituted as un/va…
Sociology (28 obras) · Psychology (18 obras) · Epistemology (17 obras) · Political science (16 obras) · Law (14 obras) · Aesthetics (12 obras) · Medicine (11 obras) · Philosophy (11 obras) · Social science (11 obras) · Politics (10 obras)